Amazon Echo quietly goes on sale in Australia from $49

The device hits stores in New Zealand and Australia in early February with an Air New Zealand feature to be made available through the Amazon Alexa skill store that will allow its customers to conveniently check their flight status.

With these speakers you can play music, get weather updates, set alarms, keep tabs on your appointments, control your lights and do plenty more.

Though Siri has been living inside iPhones since 2011, Amazon'sAlexa has been a big figure in the quickly growing smart home market. Amazon said 10,000 Alexa skills, which are similar to what apps are to your phone, will be available at Australian launch.

Amazon Australia announced this week that the new version of Alexa not only has a local accent (and will respond with "No worries" in lieu of "you're welcome"), it also has a broad range of local partnerships to allow the device to quickly integrate into the users life. It has a 1.5-centimetre tweeter, 6.35-centimetre woofer, so it's essentially like the Echo Dot but with more bass, making it a more capable standalone speaker. The launch will absolutely heat up Australia's voice-based interaction market, coming just a couple of months after rival, Google, officially launched its Google Home in the local market.

"As more people adopt innovative voice-activated technologies in an increasingly mobile world, we are excited to be one of the leaders in this space providing secure, easy to use, cutting edge banking services for our customers". "The hipages skill for Alexa brings a new and helpful capability for Alexa customers in Australia", said Rob Pulciani, Director, Amazon Alexa. Smart hardware will arrive to customers starting on the above date.

"We're constantly working to develop concepts and initiatives that will be helpful to our customers, and we rely heavily on data to inform all such initiatives", Village GM of marketing and sales, Mohit Bhargava, said. "We're opening doors for our customers to have access to an incredible catalogue of music, and to be able to listen to some of their favourite artists while using the power of voice in exciting new ways". "Our customers just want to be able to book whenever, wherever, as easily as possible".

Amazon say that Echo preorders will ship out on the 1st of February alongside the local launch of their Prime Music subscription service.

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